Allow option to keep the containers alive

It would be nice to keep the docker containers alive for speeding up the test runs. Now, in every test run containers are re-created and can’t keep them alive since this block

  def __del__(self):
        """
        Try to remove the container in all circumstances
        """
        if self._container is not None:
            try:
                self.stop()
            except:  # noqa: E722
                pass

removes containers when the instance variable is deleted (when the program terminates) and I cannot override it because this also runs without using with as block.

I don’t want my Mysql container to be recreated everytime. I am running tests very frequently and I am waiting couple seconds everytime. Pretty annoying.

I can make a small PR if that makes sense?

[tillahoffmann]

Sounds like there is sufficiently broad interest in this feature. We could add a remove: bool = True keyword argument to the constructor and keep the container alive if not remove. Note that a PR would now need to modify the atexit registration once #208 is merged.

[tillahoffmann]

@Can-Sahin, makes sense to want to keep the container alive to speed up tests. Having said that, I’m not sure how you’d be able to connect to the existing container after the reference to the instance variable has been discarded.

If you’re using pytest, you can use global fixtures to reuse the same container across all test runs within the same process. Reusing an existing container across different test runs/processes would require persisting information about the container across runs—container management should probably be outside the scope of this project.